Yahoo Lifestyle Cinema Guild Acquires North American Rights To Restored Prints Of Shinji Somai Classics ‘The Friends’ & ‘Love Hotel’
EXCLUSIVE: Cinema Guild has picked up North American distribution rights to The Friends (1994) and Love Hotel (1985), two films by revered Japanese filmmaker Shinji Somai.
Love Hotel will open on April 4 at Metrograph in New York City before expanding nationwide while The Friends is slated for a summer theatrical release. Digital and home video releases will follow.
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The deals were negotiated by Peter Kelly and Edward McCarry of Cinema Guild with MK2 and the Nikkatsu Corporation. These acquisitions are the latest part of Cinema Guild’s multi-year project to promote Somai’s legacy. The late filmmaker, best known for seminal titles like Moving (1993) and Typhoon Club (1985), is often cited as a contemporary pioneer in Japan by filmmakers like Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Ryusuke Hamaguchi but has remained largely unknown outside Japan.
The Friends—newly restored in 4K—follows a group of three young boys. In the dog days of summer, the kids discover a decrepit house and the old man (Rentaro Mikuni) who lives there alone. Up to no good, they spy on him. But as they learn the sad story behind his present wretchedness, they begin to develop an unlikely bond with the old-timer. The film is Somai’s follow-up to Moving (1993), which debuted at Cannes in 1993 and was recently the subject of a retrospective screening at the 2023 Venice Film Festival.
Love Hotel chronicles the encounter of a call girl and a married man with a debt to the yakuza who have a violent rendezvous in a cheap love hotel. Years later, haunted by the memory of that night, they reconnect and begin a strange love affair.
“The more Somai films one sees, the more one understands the depth of his singularity,” Edward McCarry of Cinema Guild said in a statement. “We’ve been so pleased to see the love for Somai’s work over the past years. We’re very proud to continue this project with these two films, representing two distinct periods of his production in two very different genres, which nevertheless both exhibit his truly inimitable touch.”
Cinema Guild previously brought 4K restorations of Moving and Typhoon Club stateside. Upcoming releases from the buzzy company also include Matías Piñeiro’s You Burn Me, Hong Sangsoo’s By the Stream, Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire, and the films of João César Monteiro. Recent releases include Hong Sangsoo’s A Traveler’s Needs, and Kazik Radwanski’s Matt and Mara.
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